The Pyramid Texts

First Words Against Death

First attested
24th century BCEthe spells carved in the burial chamber and antechamber of the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, around 2350 BCE
Claimed
around 10500 BCEasserted by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, whose Keeper of Genesis (1996; published in the United States as The Message of the Sphinx) reads the Pyramid Texts' Duat and Orion passages as memory of a "First Time", Zep Tepi, around 10,500 BCE — a correlation the astronomer E. C. Krupp rebutted in print in 1997, objecting that it requires the Giza ground plan to be inverted

The claim runs about 8.2 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead are a real sequence, but the story that it shows the afterlife being democratised from king to commoner is a modern scholarly narrative — and Mark Smith (2009) and Harold Hays (2011) argue that the change it describes is not visible in the evidence.

Words to carry a dead king skyward, trusted so literally that carved snakes were cut in two.

Cut into the burial chamber and antechamber of Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty, at Saqqara around 2350 BCE, and afterwards in later kings' and queens' pyramids down to Ibi in the Eighth. Gaston Maspero entered the inscribed chambers in 1880–81; Kurt Sethe's edition, from 1908, imposed the 714 spell numbers still cited. They carry the king skyward — he becomes an akh, takes the ladder, joins the imperishable stars — and hold the earliest surviving attestations of the ba, the ka and the king's identification with Osiris. James Allen's 2005 translation prints each pyramid in its own reading order: there is no canon, no two agree. The Coffin Texts follow, from the First Intermediate Period into the Middle Kingdom, and the Book of the Dead on New Kingdom papyrus — a sequence long read as the afterlife democratised from king to commoner, which Mark Smith and Harold Hays have argued since 2009 the evidence does not show.

Light

Egypt's earliest surviving attempt to write a way past death, and belief literal enough to alter the writing itself: in the burial chamber, signs of living creatures are carved maimed — snakes cut in two, birds without legs — so the creature written cannot act.

Shadow

The pyramids drawing esoteric attention carry no texts: Giza, read for prophecy by Piazzi Smyth from 1864, mapped onto Orion by Bauval in 1989 and with Adrian Gilbert in 1994. The monument that says in Egyptian what a pyramid was for is Unas's, rarely quoted.

Sources and verification8 sources · 5 links

Primary source

  • R. O. Faulkner (trans.), The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, 1973, 3 vols, 1973-78 (Aris & Phillips)The funerary spells that stand between the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead, beginning in the First Intermediate Period and running through the Middle Kingdom, including the transformation spells.
  • R. O. Faulkner (trans.), ed. Carol Andrews, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, 1985, British Museum PressThat 'Book of the Dead' is a modern title for New Kingdom papyri — the Egyptian is 'Book of Going Forth by Day' — and that its familiar chapter numbers are Lepsius's 1842 numbering of a late Ptolemaic papyrus rather than an ancient canon: the same absence of a fixed sequence that holds for the Pyramid Texts.
  • James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 2005, Writings from the Ancient World 23 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature); 2nd ed. 2015The wording of the corpus and its earliest attestations — the ba, the ka, the sky-ladder, the king's identification with Osiris — and the fact that Allen prints the spells pyramid by pyramid in each monument's own reading order rather than in Sethe's numbered sequence, because the corpus has no canonical order and no two pyramids carry the same selection. The volume covers six pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, c. 2350-2150 BCE.

Scholarship

  • E. C. Krupp, Pyramid Marketing Schemes, 1997, Sky & Telescope, February 1997The astronomical objection to the Orion correlation: the bend in the Giza line runs north and the kink in Orion's Belt runs south, so the two match only if the map of Egypt is inverted — which The Orion Mystery does without saying so, while the Great Pyramid's shafts show that for its builders north meant north.
  • Erik Hornung (trans. David Lorton), The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, 2001, Cornell University PressPyramidology and the wider Egyptosophy line — the reading of prophecy and cosmic measure from the uninscribed Giza monuments, from John Taylor (1859) and Charles Piazzi Smyth (1864) onward — as a modern European construction rather than an Egyptian one.
  • Jan Assmann (trans. David Lorton), Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, 2005, Cornell University PressEgyptian conceptions of the constituents of the person — ba, ka, akh, name and shadow — and the theology of transfiguring the dead that the pyramid spells enact.
  • Mark Smith, Democratization of the Afterlife, 2009, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, ed. Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich; open access at escholarship.org, item 70g428wjSmith argues that no democratization of the afterlife took place in the First Intermediate Period — the change the theory describes is not visible in the evidence — and makes the case on different grounds from earlier dissenters.
  • Harold M. Hays, The Death of the Democratisation of the Afterlife, 2011, in Nigel Strudwick and Helen Strudwick (eds), Old Kingdom, New Perspectives: Egyptian Art and Archaeology 2750-2150 BC (Oxford: Oxbow), pp. 115-130Hays argues that the democratisation theory rests on negative evidence — the absence of non-royal funerary texts before the First Intermediate Period — and traces the theory's own history in earlier Egyptology.

Linked entries

  • Often confused withThe Corpus HermeticumA modern connection

    What Western esotericism calls Egyptian wisdom is usually the Hermetica — Greek texts of Roman Egypt, c. 100-300 CE on Brian Copenhaver's dating, well over two thousand years after Unas and unconnected to these spells.

  • Often confused withThe Egyptian Book of the DeadA modern connection

    Popular writing runs the two together; the Book of the Dead is New Kingdom papyrus from about 1550 BCE, some eight centuries later, and its spells reach it through the Coffin Texts.

  • Set againstThe Bardo ThödolA modern connection

    W. Y. Evans-Wentz borrowed Egypt's title in 1927 to call it The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the Egyptian title was itself modern — Lepsius coined Todtenbuch in 1842 — so two unrelated corpora now share a name neither tradition used.

  • Set againstThe Epic of GilgameshAttested

    Maspero's excavations at Saqqara opened the inscribed pyramids in 1880–81, eight or nine years after Smith read the flood tablet — two long texts of the ancient world back in legible form within a decade of each other. The Pyramid Texts are much the older, cut around 2350 BCE, and there is no evidence of contact between the traditions that made them.

  • Gave rise toThe Egyptian Book of the DeadAttested

    Many of its spells descend, through the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts, from the Pyramid Texts cut for Unas around 2350 BCE — though the familiar story that this opened a royal afterlife to everyone is now contested.

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